Learn to Earn: A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Investing and

Sintesi

Mutual-fund superstar Peter Lynch and author John Rothchild explain the basic principles of the stock market and business in an investing guide that will enlighten and entertain anyone who is high-school age or older.

Many investors, including some with substantial portfolios, have only the sketchiest idea of how the stock market works. The reason, say Lynch and Rothchild, is that the basics of investing—the fundamentals of our economic system and what they have to do with the stock market—aren’t taught in school. At a time when individuals have to make important decisions about saving for college and 401(k) retirement funds, this failure to provide a basic education in investing can have tragic consequences.

For those who know what to look for, investment opportunities are everywhere. The average high-school student is familiar with Nike, Reebok, McDonald’s, the Gap, and the Body Shop. Nearly every teenager in America drinks Coke or Pepsi, but only a very few own shares in either company or even understand how to buy them. Every student studies American history, but few realize that our country was settled by European colonists financed by public companies in England and Holland—and the basic principles behind public companies haven’t changed in more than three hundred years.

In Learn to Earn, Lynch and Rothchild explain in a style accessible to anyone who is high-school age or older how to read a stock table in the daily newspaper, how to understand a company annual report, and why everyone should pay attention to the stock market. They explain not only how to invest, but also how to think like an investor.

Acknowledgments

The following people deserve special mention for the research and fact-checking help they provided on this book: Kathy Johnson, Charlene Niles, Deborah Pont, all courtesy of Worth magazine; Peggy Malaspina and her associates at Malaspina Communications: Lyn Hadden, Karen Perkuhn, Elizabeth Pendergast, and Susan Posner.

We’d also like to thank the staffs at the Wellesley Public Library and the Babson College Library; Joan Morrissey at St. Agnes School; David Berson at Fannie Mae; Nancy Smith, director of investor education at the Securities and Exchange Commission; our two agents, Doe Coover and Elizabeth Darhansoff; our editor, Bob Bender, and his assistant, Johanna Li.

Preface

The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing. This is a glaring omission. History we teach, but not the part about the great march of capitalism and the role that companies have played in changing (and mostly improving) the way we live. Math we teach, but not the part about how simple arithmetic can be used to tell the story of a company and help us figure out whether it will succeed or fail in what it’s trying to do and whether we might profit from owning shares of its stock.

Home economics we teach: how to sew, how to cook a turkey, even how to stick to a budget and balance a checkbook. What’s often left out is how saving money from an early age is the key to future prosperity, how investing that money in stocks is the best move a person can make, next to owning a house, and how the earlier you start saving and investing in stocks, the better you’ll do in the long run.

Patriotism we teach, but we talk more about armies and wars, politics and government, than we do about the millions of businesses, large and small, that are the key to our prosperity and our strength as a nation. Without investors to provide the money to start new companies that hire new workers, or to help older companies grow bigger, become more efficient, and pay higher wages, the world as we know it would collapse and there’d be no jobs for anybody and the United States would be out of luck.

In the past five years, a tremendous thing has happened in what used to be called the communist bloc, the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The citizens of those countries have risen up and overthrown their governments and sent their communist leaders packing, in the hope that someday they can improve their lot in life. Democracy is among the things they want, as are freedom of speech and freedom of worship, but up there with the Bill of Rights freedoms, they also want free enterprise. That includes the right to make things, sell things, and buy things in stores, the right to own a house, an apartment, a car, or a business, which until recently, perhaps half the world’s population was not allowed to do.

The Russians and the Eastern Europeans marched, demonstrated, held strikes, organized, agitated, and fought as hard as they could to get the economic system that we have already. Many people went to jail for this cause, and many lost their lives. Yet in our own schools we don’t teach the basics of how this economic system works, and what’s good about it, and how you can take advantage of it by becoming an investor.

Investing is fun. It’s interesting. Learning about it can be an enriching experience, in more ways than one. It can put you on the road to prosperity for the rest of your life, yet most people don’t begin to get the hang of investing until they reach middle age, when their eyes start to go bad and their waistlines expand. Then they discover the advantages of owning stocks, and they wish they’d known about them earlier.

In our society, it’s been the men who’ve handled most of the finances, and the women who’ve stood by and watched men botch things up. There’s nothing about investing that a woman can’t do as well as a man. Also, you don’t get the knack for it through the chromosomes. So when you hear somebody say, He’s a natural-born investor, don’t believe it. The natural-born investor is a myth.

The principles of finance are simple and easily grasped. Principle number one is that savings equals investment. Money that you keep in a piggy bank or a cookie jar doesn’t count as an investment, but any time you put money in the bank, or buy a savings bond, or buy stock in a company, you’re investing. Somebody else will take that money and use it to build new stores, new houses, or new factories, which creates jobs. More jobs means more paychecks for more workers. If those workers can manage to set aside some of their earnings to save and invest, the whole process begins all over again.

It’s the same story for every family, every company, every country. Whether it’s Belgium or Botswana, China or Chile, Mozambique or Mexico, General Motors or General Electric, your family or mine, those who save and invest for the future will be more prosperous in the future than those who run out and spend all the money they get their hands on. Why is the United States such a rich country? At one point, we had one of the highest savings rates in the world.

A lot of people must have told you by now that it’s important to get a good education, so you can find a promising career that pays you a decent wage. But they may not have told you that in the long run, it’s not just how much money you make that will determine your future prosperity. It’s how much of that money you put to work by saving it and investing it.

The best time to get started investing is when you’re young, as we’ll discuss in more detail later. The more time you have to let your investments grow, the bigger the fortune you’ll end up with. But this introduction to finance is not only for young people. It’s for beginning investors of all ages who find stocks confusing and who haven’t yet had the chance to learn the basics.

People are living much longer than they used to, which means they’ll be paying bills for a lot longer than they used to. If a couple makes it to sixty-five, there’s a good chance they’ll make it to eighty-five, and if they make it to eighty-five, there’s a decent chance one of them will reach ninety-five. In order to cover their living expenses they’ll need extra money, and the surest way to get it is by investing.

It’s not too late to start investing at age sixty-five. Today’s sixty-five-year-olds might be looking at twenty-five more years during which their money can continue to grow, to give them the wherewithal to pay the twenty-five years’ worth of extra bills.

When you’re fifteen or twenty, it’s hard to imagine the day will come when you’ll turn sixty-five, but if you get in the habit of saving and investing, by then your money will have been working in your favor for fifty years. Fifty years of putting money away will produce astonishing results, even if you only put away a small amount at a time.

The more you invest the better off you’ll be, and the nation will be better off as well, because your money will help create new businesses and more jobs.

INTRODUCTION

The Companies Around Us

When a group of people goes into business together, they usually form a company. Most business in the world is done by companies. The word company comes from a Latin word that means companion.

The formal name for a company is corporation. Corporation comes from corpus, another Latin word, meaning body, in this case, a body of people who join together to conduct business. Corpse also comes from corpus, although this has nothing to do with the subject at hand, since corpses are unable to do business.

To form a corporation is easy. All it takes is paying a small fee and filing a few papers in the state in which you want to maintain a legal address. Delaware is the most popular choice, because the laws there are favorable to business, but thousands of new corporations are formed every year in every state. Whenever you see an inc. attached to the end of the name of a business, it means that company has filed the papers to become a corporation. Inc. is short for incorporated.

In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a separate individual that can be punished for bad behavior, usually by the imposition of a fine. That’s the main reason owners of a business go to the trouble of getting incorporated. If they do something wrong and they get sued, the corporation takes the rap and they get off the hook. Imagine if you borrowed your parents’ car without permission and ran it into a tree, how much better you’d feel if you were incorporated.

Do you remember the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, when an oil tanker ran aground and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound? This created a huge mess that took months to clean up. The tanker belonged to Exxon, America’s third-largest company. At the time, Exxon had hundreds of thousands of shareholders who were part owners of the business.

If Exxon hadn’t been incorporated, all those people could have gotten sued individually, and lost their life savings on account of an oil spill that wasn’t their fault. Even if Exxon were found innocent, they would have had to pay the legal bills to defend themselves—in this country you’re innocent until proven guilty, but you pay the lawyers either way.

That’s the beauty of the corporation. It can be sued, as can its managers and directors, but the owners—the shareholders—are protected. They can’t be sued in the first place. In England, companies put the word limited after their names. This indicates that the liability of the owners is limited, just the way it is in U.S. companies. (If anybody ever asks you what the limited means, now you’ve got the answer.)

This is a crucial safeguard of our capitalist system, because if shareholders could be sued whenever a company made a mistake, people like you and me would be afraid to buy shares and become investors. Why would we want to run the risk of being held responsible for another big oil spill, or a rat hair in a hamburger, or the endless variety of mishaps that occur in business every day? Without limited liability, nobody would want to buy a single share of stock.

Private Companies and Public Companies

The vast majority of businesses in this country are private. They are owned by one person or a small group of people, and more often than not, the ownership is kept in the family. You can find examples of private companies up and down the block on every main street in every village and town, and scattered throughout the cities of America and the world. These are the barbershops, hair salons, shoe-repair outlets, bicycle shops, baseball-card stores, candy stores, junk stores, antique stores, second-hand stores, vegetable stands, bowling alleys, bars, jewelry stores, used-car lots, and local mom-and-pop restaurants. Most hospitals and universities are private as well.

What makes these businesses private is that the general public can’t invest in them. If you spend the night at the Sleepy Holler motel, and you’re impressed with the place and how it’s run, you can’t very well knock on the manager’s door and demand to be made a partner. Unless you’re related to the owners, or the owner has a son or daughter who wants to marry you, your chances of getting a share in this business are close to zero.

Look at the difference when you spend the night at a Hilton or a Marriott and you’re impressed with those places. You don’t have to knock on any doors, or marry anybody’s son or daughter to become an owner. All you have to do is call a stockbroker and put in an order to buy shares. Hilton and Marriott sell their shares in the stock market. Any company that does this is called a public company.

(Although there are more private companies than public companies in America, the public companies are generally much bigger, which is why most people work for public companies.)

In a public company, you and your parents, your aunt Sally, or the neighbors down the block can all buy shares and become owners automatically. Once you’ve paid your money, you get a certificate, called a stock certificate, that proves you’re one of the owners. This piece of paper has real value. You can sell it whenever you want.

A public company is the most democratic institution in the world, when it comes to who can be an owner. It’s an example of true equal opportunity. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what sex, what religion, what sign of the zodiac, or what nationality, or whether you have bunions, pimples, or bad breath.

Even if the chairman of the board of McDonald’s holds a grudge against you, he can’t stop you from becoming an owner of McDonald’s. The shares are out there in the stock market, being sold five days a week, six-and-a-half hours a day, and whoever has the cash and pays the price can buy as many as he or she wants. What’s true for McDonald’s is also true for the thirteen thousand other public companies in the United States today—a list that continues to grow. Public companies are everywhere, and they surround you from morning to night. You can’t get away from them.

What do Nike, Chrysler, General Motors, the Gap, the Boston Celtics, United Airlines, Staples, Wendy’s, Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson, Sunglass Hut, Marvel Comics, Kodak, Fuji, Wal-Mart, Rubbermaid, Time Warner, and Winnebago have in common? They’re all public companies. You can play the alphabet game, A to Z, naming a public company for each letter.

Inside the house, down the street, around the school, and through the malls, you can’t help running into a large crowd of them. Nearly everything you eat, wear, read, listen to, ride in, lie on, or gargle with is made by one. Perfume to penknives, hot tubs to hot dogs, nuts to nail polish are made by businesses that you can own.

The sheets on your bed might come from Westpoint Stevens; the clock radio from General Electric; the toilet, sink, and faucets from American Standard or Eljer; the toothpaste and shampoo from Procter & Gamble; the razors from Gillette; the lotions from the Body Shop; the toothbrushes from Colgate-Palmolive.

Put on your Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear, the skirts and slacks made by Hagar or Farah that you bought from the Gap or the Limited, sewn from fabric that came from Galey and Lord out of fibers produced by Du Pont Chemical. Lace up your Reeboks or the Keds you bought at the Foot Locker (a division of Woolworth), where you paid the bill with a Citibank VISA card. Already, you’re involved with dozens of public companies, and you haven’t gotten to the breakfast table.

There, you’ll find the Cheerios supplied by General Mills; the Pop Tarts and Eggo waffles supplied by Kelloggs; the Tropicana orange juice by Seagram, better known for whiskey than for fruit drinks; the Entenmann’s brought to you by Philip Morris, which also produces Kraft cheese and Oscar Mayer hot dogs in addition to their Marlboros. Your toast may pop out of a toaster from Toastmaster, which has been in business since the 1920s and is still going strong.

The coffeepot, microwave, stove, and refrigerator are made by public companies, and the larger supermarkets where you or your parents buy the food are public as well.

Maybe you ride to school in a bus built by General Motors out of steel from Bethlehem Steel, with the windshield glass coming from PPG Industries, the tires from Goodyear, and the wheels made by Superior Industries from aluminum that Superior gets from Alcoa. The gas for the bus comes from Exxon, Texaco, or one of the many public oil companies. The bus is insured by Aetna. The bus itself may be owned by Laidlaw, a company that runs the bus system in many school districts.

The books in your book bag have likely been published by one of the publicly owned book companies, such as McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, or Simon & Schuster, the publishers of the book you’re reading right now. Simon & Schuster is a division of Paramount, which until recently also owned Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks basketball team, and the New York Rangers hockey team. In 1994, another public company, Viacom, swallowed Paramount in a takeover.

Takeovers happen all the time in business. On Wall Street, there are more raids and conquests than you’ll see in any war movie made by Paramount; or by Universal Studios, a division of MCA that got taken over by the Japanese; or by MCA itself, which is now a part of Seagram.

Maybe you eat the school lunch that’s cooked on an Amana Radar range made by Raytheon, the same company that makes the Patriot missile. Or maybe you drive off campus to the nearest publicly owned hamburger joints: McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Burger King, which is a division of Grand Metropolitian, a British public company. Coke and Pepsi come from public companies, and Pepsi also owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Frito-Lay, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, so Pepsi shareholders invest in all of these at once.

Hershey bars, Wrigley’s gum, Tootsie Rolls, and most of the candy in vending machines are produced by public companies, except for Snickers candy, made by the Mars family.

When you get home in the afternoon and pick up the phone to call your boyfriend or girlfriend, you’re using the services of at least one publicly traded phone company, and if it’s a long-distance call, you’re using three: the Baby Bell (NYNEX, PacTel, etc.) that serves your neighborhood; the long-distance carrier (Sprint, MCI, or the original Ma Bell, AT&T) that carries the call out of town; and another Baby Bell at the other end of the line.

You can buy stock in any or all of these companies, as well as in the supporting cast of suppliers of cables and switches, companies that make and launch telecommunications satellites, and companies that manufacture the phones themselves.

Your TV set is made by a public company, most likely Japanese. If you’ve got cable, it’s a good bet your cable company is public. Of the three major networks, CBS was recently taken over by Westinghouse, NBC is owned by General Electric, and ABC is merging with Disney. Westinghouse, General Electric, and Disney are all public companies, and so is Turner Broadcasting, which owns and operates CNN and has agreed to merge with Time Warner.

You can invest in Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Oprah by buying shares in King World, a public company that syndicates those three shows, among others. You can invest in The Simpsons or in Cops by buying shares in Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp. Newscorp owns Twentieth Century Fox Television—the Fox network—which in turn owns these two shows. Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, and MTV belong to Viacom, the parent company of Blockbuster Video.

Most of the products advertised on TV are made by public companies. Many of these ads are written and produced by public ad agencies such as the Interpublic Group.

It’s easier to rattle off one thousand names of big-time companies that are public than it is to name ten that are still private. While there’s no shortage of mom-and-pop businesses that are private, when you get to the major leagues, it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t sell shares to the public. As already mentioned, the Mars company, which makes Mars bars, Milky Way, and Snickers, is private; so is Levi Strauss, the blue jeans manufacturer. A few insurance giants—John Hancock, for instance—are mutual companies, but maybe not for long.

In almost every chain of stores or fast-food outlets you can think of, every major manufacturer, every company with a brand-name product, you can be an owner. It’s not as expensive as you might imagine. In fact, for slightly more than the price of a one-day pass to the Magic Kingdom, you can become part owner of the entire Disney empire, and for the same price as twenty Big Macs plus fries, you can become an owner of McDonald’s, along with a lot of big shots on Wall Street.

No matter how old you are or how many shares of stock you’ll buy in your lifetime, it’s always a thrill to walk into a McDonald’s, a Toys R Us, or a Circuit City and watch the customers lining up to buy the merchandise, knowing that you’ve got a piece of the action and that some smidgeon of the profits will end up in your pocket. When you buy a VCR from Circuit City or rent a video from Blockbuster, if you’re an owner of either of these companies, you’re actually spending money for your own benefit.

This is an important part of our way of life that the Founding Fathers couldn’t have dreamed up. From sea to shining sea, over 50 million men, women, and children have become part owners in thirteen thousand different public companies. Being a shareholder is the greatest method ever invented to allow masses of people to participate in the growth and prosperity of a country. It’s a two-way street. When a company sells shares, it uses the money to open new stores, or build new factories, or upgrade its merchandise, so it can sell more products to more customers and increase its profits. And as the company gets bigger and more prosperous, its shares become more valuable, so the investors are rewarded for putting their money to such good use.

Meanwhile, a company that prospers can afford to give pay raises to its workers and move them up the line to bigger and more important jobs. It will also pay more taxes on its increased profits, so the government will have more money to spend on schools, roads, and other projects that benefit society. This whole beneficial chain of events begins when people like you invest in a company.

Investors are the first link in the capitalist chain. The more money you can manage to save, and the more shares you buy in companies, the better off you’re likely to be, because if you pick your companies wisely and don’t get impatient, your shares will be worth a lot more in the future than they were on the day you bought them.

ONE

A Short History of Capitalism

The Dawn of Capitalism

Capitalism happens when people make things and sell them for money. Or if they don’t make things, they provide services for money. For much of human history, capitalism was an alien concept, because the bulk of the world’s population never got their hands on money. Over thousands of years, the average person lived out his or her life without buying a single item.

People worked as serfs, slaves, or servants, for masters who owned the land and everything on it. In return, the workers were given free room in a hut and a tiny plot of ground where they could grow their own vegetables. But they didn’t get a paycheck.

Nobody complained about working for zero pay, because there was no place to spend it. Once in a while, a pack of traveling salesmen would come through town and set up a market, but a market was an isolated event. The kings, queens, princes, princesses, dukes, earls, and so forth, who owned all the property—buildings, furniture, animals, ox carts, everything from gold jewelry to pots and pans—kept it in the family. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to sell off a piece of land, even if they could make a big profit and have less grass to mow. There were no for sale signs in front of castles. The only ways to acquire real estate were to inherit it or to take it by force.

In many parts of the world, since the earliest days of Judaism and continuing with Christianity, business for profit was an X-rated activity, and lending money and charging interest could get you kicked out of the church or the synagogue and guarantee you an eternal spot in hell. Bankers had an unsavory reputation, and people had to sneak around and visit them on the sly. The idea of benefiting from a transaction, or getting ahead in life, was regarded as selfish, immoral, and counter to God’s plan for an orderly universe. Today, everybody wants to improve his or her lot, but if you had lived in the Middle Ages and you said your goal was to get ahead or to better yourself, your friends would have given you blank looks. The concept of getting ahead didn’t exist.

If you want more details about what life was like before there were markets and